The Hidden Man (3 page)

“When was he arrested?” I asked.

“September,” he said. “Of last year.”

“September—of ’06?” If this were a single-defendant case, as it seemed to be, that meant the trial couldn’t be far away.

“Four weeks from today,” Smith informed me.

“Well.” I waved a hand. “We’ll have to get the trial date kicked.”

“That won’t work.”

Sometimes I smile when I’m getting really annoyed with someone. I smile and count to ten. After reaching the count of six, I said, “We need to be clear on a few things, Smith. If you want to pay me, that’s fine. I don’t care who’s doing the paying as long as the money is there. Right? But you don’t decide what will work. My client and I make those decisions. You’re not my client, nor are you even related to this client. So you have no say. You’re an ATM machine to me and nothing more. And I’m not taking a first-degree on one-month’s notice.”

Smith nodded at me, but he wasn’t agreeing with me. Kind of like how I smile when I’m pissed off. “You’ll consult with your client on that,” he said.

“I’ll tell this client what I just told you, and if he doesn’t like it, he won’t be my client.”

Smith considered me. I wanted to wipe the smug expression off his face. Maybe I’d use his pocket square to do it. Finally, the briefest hint of a smile appeared.

“The client is an old friend of yours,” he said. “The client is Sam Cutler.”

Sammy.
It came at me at once, a tidal wave of images, sights and sounds and smells from so long ago. So this was why Smith had picked me.

“Audrey,” I said. “Sammy killed the pedophile who killed his sister, Audrey?”

“Correct.” Smith nodded. “Griffin Perlini, you’ll recall.”

Even now, I physically shuddered at the name. The bogeyman to a seven-year-old. I could attribute many sleepless nights, and many burned-out lightbulbs, to that name. The man who single-handedly laid wreck to the Cutler family.

“There are those of us who believe that Mr. Cutler should not be punished for that act,” Smith said.

Of all the images that might stick, for some reason it was this: Audrey Cutler, a year and a half old, staggering around on a toddler’s legs in the grass backyard, Sammy hovering behind her to catch her fall. One of the other kids made a joke about how Audrey walked—
she looks retarded
or something like that. Sammy didn’t say anything at the time; he only looked at me. When Sammy’s mother called for Audrey to come in, Sammy carried her inside. By the time he returned to the backyard a few minutes later, I was already holding the kid down, and Sammy and I made sure he never had anything but compliments about Audrey’s walking ability in the future.

I didn’t know how to feel about all of this. Since Talia and Emily, most of my emotions had atrophied. I felt tension and panic begin to flex their muscles.

Sammy, obviously, had asked for me. That stood to reason, I guess. I wondered how closely he had followed the course of my life. I hadn’t spoken to Sammy Cutler in almost twenty years. I had no idea what had become of him, which made me feel uneasy with myself.

“The money will not be a problem,” Smith informed me. “I will have a healthy retainer delivered to you no later than tomorrow. I trust you’ll have time in your schedule to visit Mr. Cutler this afternoon?”

I nodded absently, as the wave of memories poured forth, a young boy who’d lost his sister, a devastated mother, the picture of an open window into Audrey Cutler’s bedroom on a haunted summer night.

5

T
ALIA PUSHES OUR DAUGHTER, Emily, in the stroller through the city’s zoo, stopping at the sea lion pool as Emily squeals with delight. Emily wants out. Talia lifts her in her arms and approaches the gate, where the sea lions pop out of the water to the delight of the children, proudly thrusting their black snouts in the air.

“Seals,” Emily says.

“Sea lions.” Not that Talia knows the difference. She smiles at her daughter.

Talia always loved the city. The daughter of Italian immigrants, she was born and raised out east but moved to the city for college and never left. She loves the vitality, the pace, the diversity, the theater and dining and culture. She wants Emily to grow up here.

“Seals,” Emily says. But after ten minutes, her attention span is spent, and she is saying, “Hippos.”

“Okay, sweetheart.” Talia musses Em’s hair and kisses her forehead. Emily doesn’t want the stroller and she doesn’t want to walk, leaving Talia to carry our daughter while pushing the stroller.

“Where’s Daddy?” Emily asks.

“He has that case he’s working on, honey.” But Emily has already moved on, distracted as they pass by the next exhibit, otters. She forgets her question and struggles with the word. “Ott-oh,” she manages, clapping her hands in self-applause.

Talia’s face lights up, as it always does when our daughter is happy. Funny how those tiny details can make such a difference.

Talia kisses the top of Emily’s head. “I love you, sweetheart,” she says.

I WAS A LITTLE EARLY to the detention center where Sammy Cutler was held. The center, next to the criminal courthouse, was shiny new, but with the new construction came additional security as well. It no longer mattered if you had a bar card; attorney or not, they ran you through the metal detector and inspected your bag. I didn’t mind because I wasn’t in a hurry. I wasn’t ready to concentrate on what Sammy would tell me. I was thinking about Emily, the first time she reached out to grab my nose, though her little wrinkled hand couldn’t yet form a fist. I remembered that baby smell, the feel of that warm, tiny body in the cradle of my forearm, those wondrous, innocent eyes—

I took a ridiculously long drink from the water fountain, used the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, and looked at myself in the mirror. I was always in a foul mood after lunch, but still I kept that daily appointment, notwithstanding the fierce come-down, the growing resentment with each passing day, wondering when it would get better, if it would get better, why it would get better.

The only thing I knew was I was still a mess, still mired in a combination of self-pity, bitterness, and hopelessness. I was a lawyer, but I would be of no use to Sammy Cutler.

Sammy. Many different snapshots filtered through: The skinny little kid with the big ears and flyaway hair, scampering through the rushing water of an open fire hydrant. The ten-year-old with a buzz cut, a growing solemnity in his expression. The teenager, hardened, solving problems with his fists. Differing portraits as time moved forward, I realized now more than I had as a child.

I didn’t notice him until he approached the door with the security escort. We made eye contact, an awkward moment, as we appraised each other with the mild surprise that accompanies any encounter following decades of separation, no matter how you try to make adjustments for maturity, for hard breaks along the way. I’d done that time-adjusted analysis and come up short, way off. He wasn’t what I expected. He looked, in fact, much more like the clients I’d been defending for the last six weeks.

Sammy was thick in the torso with meaty arms, a blotchy complexion, oily hair pulled back in a ponytail. His nose was crooked, with dried, crusty skin around his nostrils. His eyes were the only sign of life, large blue eyes that searched me with the hope I’ve seen many times from clients.

So many things came back so quickly, but seeing him in manacles brought back the most logical, the most obvious vision. Age sixteen, Sammy in handcuffs, his head down inside the police interview room.

Better me than you
, he’d said to me then.

“You don’t need to do that,” I told the prison guard, who had seated Sammy in the chair and was locking his handcuffs to a metal clip on the table. The guard locked him down anyway, before leaving attorney and client to their own devices.

Sammy smiled nervously, almost apologetically. From his perspective, this had to be incredibly difficult, a reunion while in a prison jumpsuit. With some effort, given the manacles connecting his hands, he fished out cigarettes and lit up.

We were eleven when we first did that, stole a smoke from his mother and ran to the park, vainly attempting to light the damn thing by striking a match on a rock, then coughing as the smoke burned our throats and chests. Sammy never really stopped after that time, and neither did I until the day Coach Fox realized that I had some speed and could catch a football.

“Jason,” he said.

Even that simple greeting felt wrong, painful. I don’t recall Sammy ever addressing me by my first name. It was never Jason. It was
Koke
, short for
Koka-Kolarich
, a play off my last name.

“Some place for a reunion, huh?” he added.

Right, and one of those awkward ones where nobody wants to talk about their past. Most reunions would start with a rundown on immediate family. There wouldn’t be much of that here. For starters, his sister, Audrey, was abducted when Sammy was seven.

His father, Frank Cutler, a plumber who drank more often than he worked, left only a few weeks later. Way I heard it, Sammy’s mother had allowed no shortage of blame for Audrey’s abduction to fall on Frank, who had been out on a bender that evening.

Sammy’s mother, Mary, died about nine years later from kidney failure, some rare genetic thing, leaving him with no immediate family. By then, Sammy was already serving time in a juvenile detention facility. When he got out, he had no mother, father, or sister.

I knew, only from reading the file Smith had given me, that Sammy later did two stints in the penitentiary, one for possession with intent, the other for aggravated battery. The truth was, I’d barely spoken to Sammy after that day the cops had taken him away.

Better me than you
, he’d said to me then.
Better me than you.

“So you’re like a big-time lawyer, huh?” He said it like he approved. That was how I remembered Sammy. He was rough around the edges, but he never intended anyone harm. “Saw you on TV a while back about some big case.”

That was back at my old firm. I’d second-chaired the defense of a state senator on federal corruption charges. It was a fourteen-week trial, in which the feds had prosecuted a sitting state senator, Hector Almundo, on eleven counts, running the gamut from taking bribes to extortion. The trial began exactly two weeks after Talia gave birth to Emily.

“That seemed like a pretty big deal,” Sammy said.

It was, especially for me. I had joined Shaker, Riley and Flemming only about a year earlier, after being a county prosecutor. The pay jump was tremendous, and Paul Riley’s law firm was the place to be. When Paul tapped me to assist on the
Almundo
defense, and then we somehow managed to pull out a not-guilty, I was established. I was in. I was set, at the finest litigation shop in the city.

My family was a different story. Talia had had a rough pregnancy, especially near the end, and then delivered Emily as we were on the cusp of trial. Talia wasn’t deaf to my need to establish myself in my career, but still, it was hard to sell the trial to a first-time mother trying to care for a newborn by herself day and night.

Therein was the irony. It was after I was left with an empty house, and basically fell apart, that I left the law firm that had cost me such precious time with my wife and daughter.

“I mean, there we was, watching the news, and I see you on there, and I told everyone, I knew that guy, we were—we used to be—”

Sammy didn’t complete the sentence. We both sensed the awkwardness.
Used to be
. Used to spend every waking moment together. Used to be so close that we called each other brother.

“So—how’s Pete?” he asked, changing the subject.

My brother Pete, five years my junior, lives in the city like me. He’s hit a bump or two along the way, struggled with drugs a little, but he’s a good egg, and I think he’s on a straight course right now. Then again, I’m not exactly one to judge.

“You know my mom passed,” I said.

“Yeah, heard that. Heard that.” He gestured at me without looking in my direction. “Jack’s still”—he gestured with his head—“y’know—”

“Inside, yeah.” He was talking about my father. Sammy and I referred to Jack by his first name behind his back, a minor rebellion. My father’s fourth strike came about three years ago. He should probably be good for parole within the next few years, but I haven’t done the math and don’t plan to do so.

“You married?” he asked me. He smiled. “Bet you got a hot wife, right?”

“
Had
one,” I said. It wasn’t fun to acknowledge it, but in an odd way it felt good to pass on some misfortune of my own to the man who had spent much of his adult life in prison, and who could well be on the way to many more years at the same address. Maybe it leveled the field ever so slightly.

Sammy stubbed out his cigarette and grew quiet. I thought to ask him why he took so long to contact me—he’d been arrested almost a year ago and he waited until a month out from trial to get in touch with me. But it wasn’t hard to imagine his reluctance. Sammy was always fiercely proud, and it was probably killing him to come to me for help.